Monday evening at the Cafe Royal, for a quiz in aid of English Pen, the charity that supports writers in prison. You haven't seen true competition until you've watched editors of broadsheet newspapers, distinguished novelists and the controller of Radio 4 locked in furious argument about which was Frederick the Great's favourite musical instrument and what was the name of Jade Goody's range of perfumes.* No prisoners are taken.

Although I've read about it in novels by the likes of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, I've never been inside the Cafe Royal before. I'd always assumed it the sort of place where chaps stuffed napkins into their collars and chewed meat off the carcass of a bloody grouse while waiters in long white aprons poured champagne for bored girls in cocktail dresses, all of them called Binky. It turns out to be several floors of function rooms, with, doubtless, the usual kitchen staffed by Kosovans. One room seems to be full of blokes in dinner jackets and mayoral chains and women who are probably introduced as their good lady wives.

In the Pen room, while we wait for the answer sheets to be marked, Will Self introduces a fundraising auction. He begins with a rhapsodic meditation on the subject of 'upside-down people', of whom he seems to have met several while walking to the Cafe Royal. Then he's pleading for us all to install catflaps in our back doors so that our literary agents can come and go easily. When compelled to dispense the auction lots, he is so shockingly unappreciative of a signed copy of an Archers script that he collapses on to the lectern. Three times.

By the time the auction is finished, the quiz seems to have been forgotten. The victorious team from the Mail on Sunday is understandably miffed that the glory and deafening applause it may have expected has been drowned out by the sound of people heading for the cloakroom. The microphone which may have demanded order has been squashed by the impact of Mr Self.

Tuesday. I wonder how well Gordon Brown knows his Shakespeare. As that nice Claudius says in Hamlet: 'When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.' There is some awful momentum that takes hold once things start to go wrong in government. One day, it's 25 million peoples' personal details lost in a Jiffy bag down the back of a sofa. Next, it's a gaggle of retired generals laying down mortar fire in the Lords. Now it turns out the Labour party is breaking a law on political donations it brought in itself. These are the days - and we really haven't had them since the dying days of poor old John Major - when a journalist feels it's good to be alive. No pack of hyenas has anything on us.

As the day goes on, the rumours get more and more gothic. By four in the afternoon, MPs are telling us that Harriet Harman is about to resign. Half an hour later, she's issuing a statement saying nothing of the sort (although it doesn't answer lots of questions.)

Getting the right guests for Newsnight is a wearisome business, with an astonishing ability to turn clever 13-year-old producers into broken-down greybeards in a matter of months. Recently, most political programmes have found it hard to persuade senior ministers to appear, largely, we suspect, because of the centralised nature of this government; there's not much mileage in putting yourself out there unless Gordon's given you the nod. But today, some 'at this stage of the war, what we need is a futile gesture' command has been issued. Geoff Hoon is deployed.

But then the most remarkable thing happens. David Abrahams, the man who prefers to do good by stealth - and drop the party into the poo at the same time - is sitting at home watching and is so cross about what Hoon has to say that he calls in. He has been avoiding the media all day. Now he is live on air.

From a presenter's point of view, the most exciting television comes in those moments when you have no idea what's going to happen next. It's what I imagine surfing to be like, but with your trousers on. Abrahams reads from a letter that has been sent to him that day from Gordon Brown's head of fundraising. It's highly charged stuff.

The need to 'move the story on' is simultaneously one of the great motive forces and one of the defining idiocies of journalism. It's often so much more interesting to move the story backwards and find out why what happened happened. Mr Abrahams manages to take the story in both directions, answering a couple of uncertainties and raising a whole lot of new ones.

It's the most electric live moment since Alastair Campbell and Michael Howard came into the studio to snarl at each other on the night Blair resigned.

There's a positively Proustian moment as an email drops. It has an arresting beginning.

'Dear Mr Paxman, you may not remember, but some years ago you kindly offered my wife a carrot at the petting farm just outside Wisborough Green.'

Apparently, I was there feeding pigs with a daughter, as were Bob Commander and his family. Rather spookily, he even recalls the make and colour of my car at the time. His daughter is now 24 and a budding dramatist, about to be installed as artist-in-residence at the Gershwin Hotel in Manhattan. Would we like to feature her on Newsnight

I doubt we'll be able to do so, but I'm happy to pass on this exciting news. As my correspondent ends his letter: 'It's nice to have an upbeat story in these days of political and sporting failure. Thank you for your time - and my wife thanks you again for the carrot.'

And now I'm on my way to Manchester, where this weekend we're recording the latest block of University Challenge. This is mainly a new run of the spin-off series, The Professionals. (I know, I hate the title, too - you expect Bodie and Doyle to crash through the back of the set in a Ford Capri.)

Unlike some other broadcast quizzes, which have become so stupid that they're now embarrassing, we have deliberately made the questions on Challenge more difficult. We've dumbed up, not down. The result has been that the show now regularly gets the best audience on BBC2, which proves something, if only people would have the nous to learn it.

We started the grown-up series because of the number of people who complained about the unfairness of keeping tough quizzes for students. So this run will see a team of lute players competing against engineers, a gaggle of stand-up comedians tackling the Ministry of Justice and - this is truly inspired casting - four rocket scientists facing members of the clergy and congregation of Salisbury Cathedral.

I don't suppose this last pairing will answer the question of whether God exists. But, as it won't be transmitted until spring next year, it might prove that Resurrection is for real.

The life: Born in Leeds, 1950. Educated Malvern College and St Catharine's College, Cambridge. Edited the student newspaper Varsity. Awards include Bafta's Richard Dimbleby Award for current affairs in 1996 and 2000.

The work: Began journalistic career as reporter in Northern Ireland. Joined the BBC, worked on Tonight and Panorama, the Six O'Clock News and the Breakfast News. Has presented Newsnight since 1989 and University Challenge since 1994. Author of seven books, most recent, On Royalty.